


yesterday, today, tomorrow

by sidonay



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: A Series of Moments, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Angst, Anxiety, Gen, No Plot/Plotless, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-24 06:37:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14949500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidonay/pseuds/sidonay
Summary: One day, Caleb promises, it wouldn’t be like this anymore but that day seemed so unbelievably far off. There was now, there was this and then there was what theycouldhave in the distance, the peak of a mountain they didn’t have the proper gear to climb yet.





	yesterday, today, tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

> me @ myself: maybe you should just cool it for a little while, take a break from fic.
> 
> my brain: write write write write write write write—
> 
>  
> 
> This originally started as a vignette in the prologue of a Mighty Nein roadtrip AU but I liked it too much to simply leave it at that so I took it out and decided to expand on it. (Of course, this means that I’ll have to completely rewrite the beginning of that AU if I keep going with it but that’s a problem for me in the future.)
> 
> This works as a sort of snapshot of Caleb and Nott's life before they meet the rest of the Mighty Nein. I kept it in a modern setting because that's how it started.

Caleb wakes with a start as he did most mornings (most times he slept) and, for a moment, he’s forgotten where he was but the fear in his stomach disappears, turns and rises into a grumble as he rubs a hand over his face. Sitting up, he pulls his big coat around him, feels the sleeves brushing his knuckles. Sometimes he’s not sure if it was always like this or he’s lost weight. Possibly, somehow, it’s a bit of both. The murmurs of the bus station don’t pay him any mind. A shadow passes over him from behind, an exhausted family wandering to a terminal, dragging bags. It’s too early.

“It’s just me,” Nott says from where she’s standing in front of him. She’d woken him with a touch to his knee. She’s not the smallest one here but she’s definitely the greenest and she subconsciously pulls her hair forward, hiding her face. She has a mask, but she’s not wearing it. It hangs—cracked, the paint smudged during a bad touch-up job—around her neck.

“How— How long was I asleep?” Caleb asks.

“About an hour and a half,” Nott says, climbs up onto the plastic seat beside him.

“I hadn’t meant to— You’re alright?”

“Nobody bothered me,” Nott assures him. “I kept busy. You needed it.” Her pockets are crackling when she moves. A man in a baseball hat slows down, comes to a stop in front of them and they tense but then he crouches down, tightens his shoelace and continues on his way. “Hungry?”

“A little.”

“There’s a couple vending machines over there”—She points towards the wall on the opposite side of the expansive space with it’s scuffed tiles and fluorescent lights and scratched glass, the text on the signs telling them which bus left when, where they were going, in various states of disrepair—“And I swiped a couple bags of apple slices from… someone.” Vague. She didn’t want to say from who or she didn’t remember. Nott dumps her haul between them. Chips. Candy. Apples. “Here.” It’s two small bottles of juice, the cheap kind with metal lids that tore away as long as you were willing to show them some effort. Caleb chooses the blue one, spills some on his sleeve when he opens it. They’re warm. Had they come from the same place as the apples or someone different?

( _ I’m sure I packed juice before we left. You don’t just  _ misplace  _ apple slices, honey. _ )

The speakers mutter and buzz at them. There’s a woman with an expensive-looking suitcase just a few rows away. She doesn’t belong here and she looks as if she feels it. Movement in the bag Caleb has by his feet, tucked under the bench, hidden away, and he bends down, tugs on the zipper. A little furry face peers up at him.

“Anything for Frumpkin?” Caleb asks, glances up at Nott. She frowns, hesitates, but then reaches inside her jacket, takes out half a roast beef sandwich wrapped in plastic.

“I was saving it for later.” But she gives it to him without further prodding.

“There we go,” Caleb says, takes off the bread, wipes the mustard off on the plastic the best he could, feeds the meat to Frumpkin who happily accepts it in little pieces at a time. They’d need to get him water, too, at some point but that could wait. His fingers smell oddly metallic when he finishes.  _ Bloody _ .

“We have enough to get us on another bus,” Nott says. “But then we’ll have to find more.” Caleb grunts in response. He hasn’t eaten anything yet and Nott chooses a bag, rips it open, offers it to Caleb first. They dine in silence. “Where do we want to go?”

“It’s your turn to pick,” Caleb tells her, sips at his drink.

“Maybe you should choose,” Nott says, “I haven’t had very good luck.”

“That last town wasn’t so bad.”

“I think we were in two different places then,” Nott says. Caleb focuses on how she said it, looks for something there, something that happened that he missed because he missed things sometimes but she’s not giving him anything. Maybe it was a joke. He misses those sometimes, too. She pulls apart a bar of chocolate, the caramel pulling in threads that she breaks with a fingernail.

The woman with the suitcase stands up, checks her phone and then sits back down. She stares at the palm of her hand for a moment and Caleb finds himself looking down at his own but all he sees is dirt. He is unclean. (In more ways than one, in  _ many more _ .)

“Caleb.” Nott’s voice. He looks up. “We should pick somewhere.” ‘We’. Not ‘you’, even though she had given him the choice this time.

“Right.” They collect their garbage, Caleb tucking his and Nott’s empty bottles into a pocket and then lifting his bag, hoisting it over his shoulders, careful not to jostle it. Through the worn fabric, through his coat, he feels paws pressing against his back.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Bumping into her, spilling water but making sure it’s not anywhere inappropriate, just somewhere inconvenient. Its not their most elaborate grift, nor their most successful, but it’s the one that requires the least amount of effort. It’s the fastest. He apologizes, won’t look her in the eye, gives himself a subtle speech impediment because people felt  _ sorry _ for him when they did that. He’s laying it on thick, he knows, which is a risk but he doesn’t need her suspicious. Help her clean,  _ sorry sorry sorry. _ Let her go. Walk away.

There’s a new tree, planted in a pile of woodchips and held up by two sticks, tied with an old hose. It’s surrounded by concrete. Caleb doesn’t know why they did it. It’d take years before it mattered to the landscape, if it even made it that long. Who cared enough to come here and take care of it? Nott’s already there when he walks up, leaning against the trunk that’s thinner than she is, pulling on one of the leaves.

“Did you get it?” Caleb asks. The woman’s wallet is long and leather, the clasp a bright silver. They don’t need her cards or the picture of her family (she’s smiling, her daughter is smiling, her husband is not)—just the cash. There’s fifty dollars in there. Fifty dollars and one cent. They drop the wallet in a mailbox and Caleb buries the penny underneath the tree. He’s not sure why. It just felt right.  
  


 

* * *

 

 

There are places that still sell magic but they are rare and difficult to find. You have to ask the right people,  _ know _ the right people but Caleb does not. Not anymore. (He never did. Those people were not  _ right _ about anything and he hates that sometimes he still has to remind himself of that.) Still: he finds them because talking, striking up a conversation, is something he can do when he has to;  _ I see you’re reading something. I’m a voracious reader myself. Where did you find that particular book? _

Franchise stores never had what he was looking for; it was the used bookstores that he wanted. It was surprising, actually, how often those types of books got left in places like that. Sometimes the owners knew what they had when Caleb approached the counter, sometimes they didn’t. Caleb preferred the latter, simply because they were willing to let the tomes go for far cheaper than they were worth.

(He’d distract them, count out small bills and change carefully, give Nott a chance to take a knickknack, even if it was simply the button off of an old chair or the paper bag from the owner’s lunch. Her fingers got itchy. He indulged her.)

They go to a library (nobody knew who they were and nobody cared; they were left alone and that’s all Caleb could ask for) and he reads them, uses his waning pile of good paper and a fancy pen that Nott had lifted from a man in a business suit standing on a street corner, waiting for the light to turn, to copy the spells. He learns and loses track of time, day shifting into night after a couple blinks and his hand has cramped, hurt to bend it too much, but it was worth it. That’s what he told himself.  _ This is worth it. _

It was worth it even though he spent too much of their money on materials just so he could make them work, Nott saying that it was okay, offering from her own stash when he’d search through his pockets and only came out with two crumpled bills when what he wanted cost so much more. Here today, gone tomorrow. He apologizes every time but she always tells him it’s fine.

“You need this,” she says. It’s the same way she tells him that he needs sleep.

“Thank you,” he replies, makes sure that she understands that he means it.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He doesn’t like bars. The atmosphere, the people— it’s suffocating. But Nott needs to drink, same as she needs to steal, so they wind up in one. Liquor stores were later, the cheap stuff so that she could fill up her flask for the days when they wandered through a dry county or the long trips, stranded and waiting and waiting before they could be taken someplace new.

“Caleb.” Nott has her hands wrapped around a hefty glass. She says his name a lot, he’s noticed. There were smudges on it, on the  _ inside _ of it. It hadn’t been cleaned very well. The music stops and a man that had been sitting at the counter stands, nudges his beer with the side of his hand as he steadies himself, goes to the jukebox and rummages in his pants for change. Caleb didn’t think they made those machines anymore.

“Yes?”

“I saw a motel on our way here,” she says. It didn’t seem like that’s what she had wanted to say but had swerved at the last second, scrounged for something else like that drunk searching for coins. It had been awhile since they’d had a bed—it’d been buses and station seats and nowhere at all because Caleb had trouble sleeping and Nott was easy to carry. Sometimes it was simpler to just keep going.

“Yeah. Okay. We could do that,” Caleb says. The bag under their table moves and, for a worrying second, Caleb thinks that Frumpkin has climbed out (they’d been lucky so far; Frumpkin was good and knew how to stay hidden, stay quiet) but he’s just adjusting. There’s a  _ tap tap click _ from the jukebox and then a banjo starts to play.  
  


 

* * *

 

 

“How many nights?” The man asks, chewing on an old toothpick, teeth leaving notches in the wood. He’s eyeing Nott warily and Caleb can’t help it, takes a step in front of her, blocking her from him which he knows is likely  _ more _ fishy than if he’d done nothing at all. He should have disguised himself but it was late and his head was buzzing in tune with the fluorescent beacon that hung over the glass door into the motel’s office.

“Just the one,” Caleb says. He signs a name that isn’t his and the key is sticky from clammy skin when he accepts it.

There’s a thread that he has—silver, razor thin—that he winds from one end of their door to the other, stretches it across the window with it’s long, bent blinds, the metal rattling when he bumps into them. Nott asked what it was for only once but never why. He unzips his bag, lets Frumpkin out and he immediately begins to explore, padding around, winds himself through Nott’s legs. Caleb pulls the only wobbly chair in the room towards the window.

He sits down, stares out of it. Three cars in the parking lot. The shadowy movements on the man who’d given them their room key. But that’s it. Nothing else. He doesn’t move. Caleb doesn’t always do  _ this _ but tonight it felt necessary. Like he had to.

“Expecting someone?” Nott asks. She’s cross-legged on the center of the bed. There’s food in front of her but Caleb has no idea where it came from; either she had it the entire time or she’s been pilfering it as they made their way through town. It’s not a lot.

“Hopefully not.” Silence that drags out for maybe a little too long. A truck wails as it passes by and the sound reminds him of something that brings a tightness to his entire body.

“Those spells you found today...” Nott says. A bag crinkles. Frumpkin chirps. “What do they do?” He thinks for a second that she’s making sure that the money they could have used on a hot meal or a few more tiny bottles from near the cash register at the liquor store was put to good enough use but, really, she’s trying to get him talking. Caleb turns slightly in his chair and feels it waver, the legs unbalanced (he could relate), and tells her anyway. She nods, pulls the foil off from a now long-since cold breakfast sandwich, takes the bacon off and somehow it still looks crispy. At some point, a weak paper cup filled with water from the bathroom sink winds up in his hand. “They’ll protect us.”

“They will.”

“And they’ll help make you stronger.” Caleb watches her, the only light from the motel sign outside and the lamp screwed into the overhang over the stretch of concrete outside their door, currently being assaulted by a moth. He tries to find the meaning in those words, what she was implying if she was implying anything at all.

“Of course,” he says eventually.

“Hm. Alright.” That’s all he gets. “Here.” The rest of the sandwich, sans most of the bacon, put in his lap.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Caleb is restless. That’s nothing new. Nott is at his back, Frumpkin curled up on the pillow, fur warm against his forehead. He feels breathing on both sides, holds his own so it’s only there’s that he’s aware of but then lets it go because he doesn’t want Nott to think he’s died in his sleep. He still has his coat on and he rubs the coarse fabric between his index finger and his thumb.

He sleeps over the covers because it’s easier to run when you don’t have sheets tangled around your legs and he keeps his shoes on because the time it would take to put them on could be put to much better use. He faces the door. The blinds sway from a draft in the window sill and there’s a strange sort of strum all around them, filling up the empty spaces in the room.

Nott shifts and it brings a sudden pain in his chest. He doesn’t deserve her.

“I shouldn’t have gotten you involved in this,” Caleb whispers, speaks it into Frumpkin to mask the noise. He could ask her to leave but he knows she wouldn’t. Truthfully, he didn’t  _ want _ her to go. But just as he didn’t deserve her, she didn’t deserve to share even a corner of the load he carried.

One day, Caleb promises, it wouldn’t be like this anymore but that day seemed so unbelievably far off. There was now, there was this and then there was what they  _ could _ have in the distance, the peak of a mountain they didn’t have the proper gear to climb yet.

For now, once the sun rose (he thinks he can see it starting, the pale grey and yellow just at the edges of the flat roof across the lot, through the black silhouette of trees lining the highway a mile or two away from where they slept), it would be more of what it was yesterday and the day before that: bus stations, used bookstores, bars, taking what belonged to someone else, just to make sure they could still have a tomorrow at all.

He thinks again of the woman with her suitcase, her nervous energy, how she stared at the palm of her hand and he looks at his own again in the dark but, once again, there isn’t anything there except dirt and skin. A twitch out of the corner of his eye and Frumpkin’s tail lands in his open palm, stays there. Caleb curls his fingers around it and presses his head deeper into the pillow that smells like bleach and chemically manufactured flowers and finally  _ finally _ starts to fall asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> I like writing Caleb. That's my only excuse.


End file.
